Here come the girls

We went to the theatre the other night, a desperate evening enlivened only by imagining just how much more fun we could have had with the hundred quid it cost us. The play was The Year of Magical Thinking, a monologue about death performed by Vanessa Redgrave (I know: what did we expect? Custard pies?). Anyway, for some reason, the audience was made up almost entirely of women in late middle age: a tsunami of easy-care haircuts, light-on-the-nostril spectacles and Country Casuals co-ordinates. During one of the many dull lulls, I thought about how unusual it was to see such a gathering. Where else would you find these women collected together, unless John Lewis had a bomb scare on a Saturday afternoon? After the play, as we all filed out, it was like that Here Come the Girls advert, but with dignity. No whooping about hair straighteners, just an orderly queue for the loo, a dab on the mouth with a paper hanky, and home.

Here Come the Girls was also what I thought of when I checked out Mamma Mia!, the new hit film based on the ancient hit musical based on the even ancient-er hit songs of Abba. As you'd expect, the movie is a pile of ropey old tripe made bearable by a dungareed Meryl Streep giving it absolutely loads throughout. She sings! She dances! She is funny! Amazing stuff from a grande dame who once explained that the secret of her great skin was due to the fact that she actively avoided touching her face with her fingers.

At Mamma Mia! the audience was again 85 per cent women, though they were younger, in their forties mostly. There was also a smattering of gay men. None of yer straight variety. There is no way a straight man would go to see Mamma Mia! unless he was promised hot dungareed sex after the event. (White ones, with bell bottoms, like Agnetha...) Likewise with the recent Sex and the City film, also a bloke-free zone. The film itself was sadly hollow-hearted, but still, it was nice to be in a big room full of other women. It just doesn't happen that often. Only in clothes shops or a bar on a Friday night. And in those places we're not all engaged with the same agenda. We're separate beings, not united by an experience.

Mamma Mia! and Sex and the City are unusual films, it seems to me. Both are unashamed chick flicks, but they're chick flicks with a twist. First up, they're comedies, not weepies; and second, they are massive box-office successes. This last is important: Hollywood is all about money, and the fact that two of this year's biggest cash cows were aimed at, and watched by, women is a serious business. There will be more female-friendly films to come.

Whether or not such movies will get anything other than bad reviews is another matter. Usually if something cultural attracts a lot of women, it's derided. Lots of men is OK: a crowd of chaps means something important's going on, an event worth writing about. That's why we get so much football coverage, why indie rock or rap is the only way to head a festival. If you think that's paranoid, consider how bands whose fans are female are treated by the press. Successful but lightweight is the best review they can expect.

Men are always in groups. They go to football, gigs, comic-book films together; they cuddle up in big gangs in Parliament and in pubs. When do women consciously hang out with each other in numbers of more than four? Musicals, Take That reunions and The Devil Wears Prada. Oh, and hen parties. Nothing any grown-up paper would take seriously. Cultural arbiters tend to be those darned straight men, and they don't like dancing queens of any variety.

The problem for me is... I agree with those male arbiters. Sex and the City is shallow, Mamma Mia! silly, Dirty Dancing just schmaltz-on-a-Swayze-stick. Take That I don't mind: they have three brilliant songs, which is two more than the Verve. I'm very happy that more culture is being aimed specifically at women, that we have new excuses to get together in big groups and scream just because it's funny. I'd just like what's on offer to be, you know, better.

· Kathryn Flett returns in two weeks

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